European Renaissance and Reformation 1350-1600: Science, Technology, Health Research Article from World Eras

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At age 45, after a years of wandering from court to court, job to job, the Swiss-born physician Paracelsus settle down for a couple of years in Carinthia (Austria), where he composed three treatises that are known collectively as his Carinthian Trilogy. The first of these is a vigorous defense of his novel medical ideas, which were ridiculed by contemporary court physicians, titled The Reply to Certain Calumniations of His Enemies or Seven Defences. The following is an excerpt from the fourth defense, "Concerning my journeyings." In it one sees Paracelsus' praise for the Spartan life of the wandering student of nature, who sacrifices personal comfort and monetary gain for sake of true knowledge of nature. His demand that one must travel to learn must have been old already, but appealed to. his sixteenth-century followers, who took up his cry to abandon books and seek the knowledge of...